Word: plath
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...fortunate. The dust-jacket blurb on her first book of poems, Wooroloo (HarperFlamingo; $20), alludes delicately to the author's "unusual literary pedigree," which only fires curiosity while pretending to discourage it. For Frieda Hughes is the daughter of Ted Hughes, Britain's current poet laureate, and Sylvia Plath, whose stunning confessional poems written just before her 1963 suicide made her posthumously famous and, to many, a martyr-saint in the bargain. The Hughes-Plath story has fueled numerous books and endless, usually acrimonious, debates. Frieda Hughes, 38, grew up as a bit player in an engrossing literary drama...
...time. She was just shy of her third birthday when her mother died and, as she tells TIME in an exclusive U.S. interview, retains only fragmented, "private" memories of their life together. She adds that her father--and this may surprise all the Hughes haters among the Plath defenders--raised her and her younger brother Nicholas with a keen sense of their mother's continuing presence in their young lives. "I grew up thinking of her very much as an angel. Not even so much in death, but also in life. And of course, as I grew older, it began...
...writing a "teenage symphony to God"--if it hadn't collapsed under the weight of Wilson's ambition and mental illness. I love this CD. I love its raw beauty, but even more, I love its wasted promise. (This is a boy example; girls can substitute Sylvia Plath's burned journals.) I also love the illicit access to Wilson's half-finished thoughts, to Wilson himself. Does this make me a romantic or a mild kind of stalker...
...SYLVIA PLATH (1932-1963) The searing poems she wrote just before her suicide in 1963 made her a literary and feminist martyr. Her onetime mentor Robert Lowell described her last works as "playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder." Plath's poem to her long-dead father redefined confessional writing: "Every woman adores a Fascist,/ The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like...
Hughes' account of this shared history and Plath's ruinous effect on it may or may not be accurate--and only a fool would attempt to parse another person's marriage--but it makes a poor premise for poetry. Lyric poems draw their energy from an active voice discussing the life choices, good or bad, it has made. Hughes portrays himself as a fern in a hurricane beyond his control. He gives only one poem, Dreamers, to the woman who broke up his marriage to Plath. In it he writes: "The Fable she carried/ Requisitioned...